abhibeckert

@abhibeckert@lemmy.world

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abhibeckert ,

Raises hand — my phone is primarily for communicating with other people. When I want a computer, I have my desktop for that, or if it's too big to take with me then I'll have my laptop.

The only other thing it's commonly used for is music/podcasts. And once a week or so I'll take a photo.

Sure, I don't make as many voice calls as I used to, but text communication counts if you ask me - cell phones have had that feature since 1992.

abhibeckert ,

I seriously doubt they removed seats because people were sitting on them.

More likely it was costing too much money.

At least in my city, some people don’t just sit on a seat (or sitable landscaping feature like a low wall). They eat on them, drink alcohol, leave behind food scraps rats eat the food, bottles get smashed, some people even go to the toilet next to the seat, etc. And yes - there are rubbish bins and toilets nearby.

Sometimes it’s worse, bloodstains, fights, etc.

The only parts of the city that have seats are cleaned three times a day and heavily policed with plain clothes officers on foot patrolling the area 24/7/365. That cost wasn’t necessary 10 years ago but it is today. We could go into why but that’s largely irrelevant.

abhibeckert ,

Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.

What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn't have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you're working on right now... and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardware... you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day can't actually run natively on my hardware).

AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants ( www.bbc.com )

an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed "baseball" or "basketball" – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned "softball" – typically women – were downgraded....

abhibeckert ,

McDonalds isn’t going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get.

I disagree. Screwing up your hiring process is a Darwin Award level mistake for a company. McDonalds is very very good at hiring people and a big part of that is their willingness to hire people who aren't good enough and then giving those people the training they need to succeed at work.

Choosing not to hire someone because they like baseball is insane and there's no way that would fly at McDonalds.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it ( www.theguardian.com )

OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it::The man behind ChatGPT is wooing the UAE to invest in energy-hungry AI. But if it turns out his tech can’t fix the world, he’s got his escape plan

abhibeckert ,

OpenAI runs on Azure, which is carbon neutral.

abhibeckert ,

Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?

Lots of sites require a free account these days. I don't visit those sites.

What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?

I care.

Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?

I like advertising - how else are you supposed to find out what products/services are available? Regularly visit every website of every company I might be interested in? That doesn't work.

It's data collection I dislike, nothing wrong with ads as long as they're a reasonably short interruption. Make ads relevant to the content, not the visitor.

Unfortunately under the current system I don't see ads, because the only way to block tracking is to also block most ads. Sorry, but ad networks have burned that bridge. It's going to take time to rebuild it.

Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?

A website would need to offer some really valuable service for me to "trade personal details". Even sites where I have an account (e.g. YouTube) I generally don't log into that account.

Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?

I think anything that gives users control over wether or not they're tracked is a good thing - and forcing people to sign up / agree to terms before using a site does that. If websites want my personal details to access them... that's fine with me. I just won't use those sites. Other people will make a different decision. It's how it should be.

I also think I'm not alone, and plenty of major sites will choose to just not do any tracking. I look forward to using those sites.

Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?

I reject that premise. Lemmy is free. I don't feel like "the product" when I use lemmy. The product is the content and the discussions. If Lemmy has a few ads on every page, I'd be fine with that. I think it'd be a good idea - as long as it's done right, without invading privacy.

Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?

It's their business, choose whatever revenue model they want. Just be honest and open about it.

abhibeckert ,

SS301 is a great material

Totally agree. But is this an appropriate use for it? I regularly have to use sandpaper to remove surface rust from my SS301 knife. And I don't leave that out in the rain. It's just surface rust, doesn't damage anything, but it is rust and it's very ugly.

Thankfully with a knife, it takes two seconds to remove the rust. With an entire car? And body panels with areas that are hard to get to? Honestly if I was going to buy a cybertruck I would paint it.

If you want "real" stainless, you want 316, but it's not as strong and would require significant modifications - making it thicker/heavier/more expensive/worse battery range/etc.

Toyota cars collecting and potentially sharing location data and personal information, Choice says, and it's not the only car brand facing privacy concerns ( www.abc.net.au )

Rafi Alam from CHOICE told The World Today: "When we looked at Toyota's privacy policy, we found that these Connected Services features will collect data such as fuel levels, odometer readings, vehicle location and driving data, as well as personal information like phone numbers and email addresses."...

abhibeckert ,

E2EE does help. Notifications can include the content of the notification but they don't have to and it's generally recommended to send a notification telling the device to launch the app in the background to check the server for new content. The app will then decrypt the message and display a plain text notification that is not sent to any servers.

If you're worried about metadata leaks, you can delay delivery by a random time interval.

abhibeckert ,

This is probably the three layers (three are physical, the rest are digital processing steps):

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dcdd4f35-4f82-46a3-bd67-2cfa4f71c611.png

The "generate faces" step is well in the uncanny valley territory. There's not enough light inside the headset to do passthrough video so instead they have a very primitive avatar which is recognisably you but definitely doesn't look like you.

Personally I don't think any of them contribute significantly to the weight of the headset. Probably less than 1% of the weight.

abhibeckert ,

Meh - I'm pretty sure Torvalds is just saying in public what thousands of other people were thinking quietly.

It sure is unpleasant to have your mistakes pointed out in public... but it's a hell of a lot better than not even knowing you made a mistake at all which is usually what happens.

It would be better if Torvalds told the guy he's an idiot in a private email but I'm not going to get worked up over that. Honestly I have a bigger problem with The Register making a headline out of it. The kernel mailing list is relatively private... this article is going to be attached to this poor engineer for the rest of his career. They should have omitted his name at least.

abhibeckert ,

There have been credible leaks that this was a management level problem.

They specifically didn't want the aircraft to be inspected - as it had already been inspected and doing it again would have delayed delivery... so they had a policy in place where the door was worked on "off the books" so to speak, and therefore almost nobody even knew that the work was being done. Including the people who were responsible for checking if it had been done properly.

Boeing management originally blamed Spirit for the mistake because at first glance of the work log Spirit were the only engineers who worked on the door. It was only when they checked a second backchannel work log that they discovered maintenance had been done which required removing the door even though according to the log the door was never removed (the leak is someone at Boeing replaced the rubber seal that sits in between the door and the cabin...).

Yes, someone forgot to insert the bolts however the reality is mistakes happen and telling people not to make mistakes doesn't work. You need to create an environment where mistakes don't get anyone killed and management has failed to do that.

An engineer should not do any work at all unless they have been instructed, in writing, on a well defined schedule, to do that work. And that task should be left open until it has been fully checked to verify it was done properly. That didn't happen here, and apparently it's a regular thing.

Sure, 99.999% of the time those checks are a waste of time. But when you're doing thousands of jobs a day those checks will find problems regularly and that should be all the motivation management needs to make sure the inspections are never skipped.

abhibeckert ,

But where is the infringement?

This NYT article includes the same several copyrighted images and they surely haven't paid any license. It's obviously fair use in both cases and NYT's claim that "it might not be fair use" is just ridiculous.

Worse, the NYT also includes exact copies of the images, while the AI ones are just very close to the original. That's like the difference between uploading a video of yourself playing a Taylor Swift cover and actually uploading one of Taylor Swift's own music videos to YouTube.

Even worse the NYT intentionally distributed the copyrighted images, while Midjourney did so unintentionally and specifically states it's a breach of their terms of service. Your account might be banned if you're caught using these prompts.

abhibeckert ,

It is miss-leading. You don't pay any money unless more than 2% of the EU population uses your app (there's about 50 million people in the EU who own an iPhone, and you need a million of those people to run your app to pay this fee).

If you have that many users, and zero income, then all you need to do is register as a non profit - then Apple will exempt your app entirely from the fees.

Every mass market truly free app that I can think of is already run by a non profit - so most don't have to do anything at all.

Scientists Use WiFi to See Through People's Walls ( www.popularmechanics.com )

“We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input.”

abhibeckert ,

Government tends to be ahead of the curve.

I dunno what world you're living in, but I live in a world where police still do nearly all their work with pencil and paper and if you want to talk to a police officer, no you can't talk to them on the phone or send an email. You'll have to have a meeting face to face.

abhibeckert ,

You can look up Smartflash v. Apple to find plenty of coverage. There's a lot more to this story than just a patent fight.

Racz made his fortune inventing a method of mixing hot and cold water - he created a global company selling taps all over the world and eventually sold it (the patent expired a long time ago, and AFAIK it's now the standard technology used by all tap companies). Perfect example of patents actually working as intended. His next invention and business was supposed to be in the music industry, and he partnered with a company called Gemplus to fill in gaps in his expertise - especially software R&D.

The head of R&D at Gemplus left the company and started working for Apple. Where he built all of the same stuff that he had been working on with Racz. We're talking really fundamental technology here - such as DRM to keep the record labels happy which was obviously required otherwise the whole business wouldn't work at all. Racz had lined up partnerships with major record labels and some of the biggest pop stars in the world and it all collapsed when iTunes came along with all the same stuff.

abhibeckert , (edited )

What am I missing?

The patent in question, if it's valid, would have expired several years ago. The fact that it's everyday technology today is pretty normal considering how fast technology advances. Ordinary toilet rolls were also a patented invention and there's nothing in the law that says a patent has to a complicated solution to a problem.

iTunes was the first shipping product that ever actually did what's described in the patent... and the person who ran the iTunes department that "invented" this feature was previously a subcontractor working for the guy who holds the patent - he was literally paid to implement what the patent described and then Apple poached him and he continued the work at his new job without any patent license.

I don't support patents and never will, but if there was ever a case for clear infringement then this is it. It's already been to court and apple was found guilty of patent infringement... only to have an appeals court overturn the decision in pretty questionable circumstances.

abhibeckert ,

The courts generally don't like it when you run two identical lawsuits at the same time - it's a massive waste of limited tax payer funded resources. They would've likely postponed a hypothetical amazon case indefinitely until after the lawsuit against Apple had concluded (which hasn't happened yet, it's still in the appeals process).

After his case with Apple is over, if he wins that case, then he can privately talk to Amazon and try to reach a settlement that doesn't involve any court cases.

Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption ( finance.yahoo.com )

Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption::The potential to significantly reduce pollution could be huge.

abhibeckert ,

Nah that's bullshit.

Interstate powerlines are like half an inch and they carry several orders of magnitude more power than you'd ever need to quickly charge a car battery.

EV charge cables are thick because a lot of them contain several wires which all need to be electrically shielded from each other (which is generally done by maintaining a physical gap between the actual wires). Part of that is just because we have multiple generations of EV charge technology and the new standards are backwards compatible with the old standards... so a lot of the wires in the cable are not even used when you charge your EV.

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